Welcome to the official website of the SURFAS project

Presentation of the project

The SURFAS project started in February 2017 and will finish in Novembrer 2020.

The interest for communicating devices (CDs) is increasing rapidly because of the large and yet essential services they offer as internet, wireless health care, home automation, wireless access controlling systems, alarms, etc. Proposing energy-efficient disruptive solutions for powering future CDs is the common challenge of the FCE zone the SURFAS project is intended to tackle.

The objective is to design a zero-power consuming electronic surface able to optimally focus ambient electromagnetic (EM) waves on the appropriate receiver in order to enable both self-powered CDs and improve their performances (sensitivity, range, rate). Such a system is new and missing in the market. It is expected to decrease the energy bill of the FCE zone by more than 5.9GWh a year, while saving 14.9 million € by just considering (but not limited to) both applications over Wi-Fi boosters and smoke alarms.

For these targeted applications two prototypes will be designed, fabricated, experimentally tested, validated over two demonstrators, and transferred to interested SMEs (more than 217 in the FCE zone) developing various kinds of CDs:

The first prototype will increase the feeding power (lifetime) harvested from ambient waves over ISM/GSM/3G/Wi-Fi bands to enable EM-based self-powered devices such as smoke alarms, detectors, sensors, etc.

The second prototype will increase the range of Wi-Fi signals without consuming additional power unlike common Wi-Fi-boosters.

Our consortium

The SURFAS consortium consists of 6 partners from France and the UK, ESIGELEC being the project leader.